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Friday, 3 May 2013

The Worcester Medieval Music Fragments

Tumultuous periods in history are equated with the destruction and
damage of culturally valuable materially. This week’s blog puts that theory to
the test!

Worcester Medieval Music Fragments. Photograph by permission of
the Chapter of Worcester Cathedral (U.K).

Many of the medieval music fragments at Worcester, like
those pictured above, have suffered over the course of history considerable
damage from fire, exposure to smoke or have deteriorated as a result of being
used as fly leaves in later fifteenth-century manuscripts and ledgers. We
commonly assume that the Reformation and Civil War, two of the most volatile
periods in English history, are entirely accountable for the poor condition of
the Worcester fragments.

The Worcester music fragments are thought to have originally
formed three volumes of music from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which
were made up of roughly five parts harmonised music to one part plainsong.
These volumes were re-used by the monks in the fifteenth-century, their pages being
torn out, recycled as wrappers and used fly leaves in later manuscripts. Though
there was burning of sacred music in 1549 on the College Green, the fragments managed
to escape the burnings because they had not been discovered.

The Civil War is the second historical event which
impacted upon the Worcester fragments’ condition, and this week we stumbled
across an interesting note from the 1660s written at the bottom of one of the medieval
music fragments. The note is by Stephen Richardson, Chapter Clerk in the years immediately
following the Civil War. The note is pictured below.

A Note by Stephen Richardson. Photograph by permission of the Chapter of Worcester Cathedral (U.K.)

It reads:

“Memorandum that Eighteene leaves were taken out of this
booke and lost when itt was in the hands of th[e] Com[m]ittee and before itt
was regained by Mr Barnabas Oley to the Church, so itt conteineth now but 48
leaves

Stephn’ Richardson”

When Worcester surrendered to the Parliamentarians in July 1646
the Committee of Sequestrations took possession of all Cathedral property and,
during the period of the Commonwealth, many of the Cathedral’s ledgers and
documents were sent to London for safe keeping by instruction of the County Committee.
Indeed, this was the case with the ledger that contained the medieval music fragment
pictured above. The note from Richardson tells us that the period in which the
fragments were in London led to further destruction, with “eighteen leaves”
being “taken out of this book lost when it was in the hands of the committee”. We
cannot be certain whether the “eighteen leaves” refers to leaves from the
ledgers / accounts or eighteen leaves of medieval music specifically.

Richardson states that the particular fragment pictured, and
the book in which it was originally bound, was “regained by Barnabas Oley to
the church”. Barnabas Oley was Canon during the restoration of the Cathedral. Oley
was greatly concerned by the loss of manuscripts and archival holdings that the
Cathedral had sustained during the Civil War. From 1661-1666 Oley travelled to
London and reclaimed several boxes of registers and ledgers connected with the
office of the Treasurer and Receiver General, and returned them to Worcester.

By the time Richardson was writing in the late 1660s the
medieval music fragments had been torn apart, recycled, and transported to
London where, under the County Committee, pages had been lost. Yet it is
curious that Richardson records that, in spite of such tumultuous historic
events, the book contains “48 leaves”. Is he suggesting there were, in the
1660s, 48 leaves of this particular music book? If this is what he is
suggesting than we are faced with the possibility that many more fragments were
lost in the post-Civil War than we have hitherto assumed. We have little
knowledge of how the fragments were treated and stored in Worcester Cathedral
Library in the three centuries prior to their rediscovery by Canon Wilson in
the early years of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, there are no more
helpful little notes by clerks like Richardson to provide us with nuggets of
information! Perhaps by turning our gaze to more recent history, than
consistently focussing on the Reformation and the Civil War, we could discover
new information on the state of the fragments over the course of history.